LAUSR

Arab Americanist questions around belonging, inclusion, transnational identity, and fraught relationships to home; and serve to make Arab difference more familiar through proximity to other more traditionally studied groups. Her use of Arab American studies is thorough and engaging, and her deftness with Arab American texts is the true draw of the monograph. Gomaa’s acuity is sharpest in her fourth chapter, “Transnational Allegories and the Non-national subject in The Agüero Sisters and The Night Counter.” The chapter unpacks Jameson’s reading of third world literatures as allegorical within the context of US immigrant writing; her analysis makes visible the “third” world within the “first” and offers, through the novel’s allegorical subjects, a critique of global capital (p. 133). At times, the main theoretical apparatus of the text—the non-national—was difficult to distinguish from other similar concepts. For example, Gomaa introduces and references Benedict Anderson’s “imagined community” as foundational to how American studies conceptualizes the nation. Through close analysis of food metaphors in Diana Abu Jaber’s The Language of Baklava (New York: Anchor Press, 2007) and Bapsi Sidhwa’s An American Brat (Minneapolis, Minn.: Milkweed Editions, 1993) Gomaa argues that our conception of the nation is more accurately “an imagined (transnational) community” (p. 30). It was unclear how the non-national differed from the transnational in this instance, and what the analysis gained from reading the disruption of national subject formation as non-national versus transnational. Similarly, Chapter 2 juxtaposes Laila Halaby’s West of Jordan (Boston: Beacon Press, 2003) with Cherrı́e Moraga’s The Last Generation (Brooklyn: South End Press, 1993) to introduce the concept of non-national time, a simultaneous but nonsynchronous temporality that disrupts a linear and progressive imagination of national subject formation and imagined (transnational) community (p. 64). Primarily, Gomaa uses non-national time to describe the events in West of Jordan while queer time accounts for The Last Generation. Where might these uses have overlapped? What are the differences between queer time and non-national time? A more thorough engagement with theories of queer time, namely J. Jack Halberstam’s In a Queer Time and Place: Transgender Bodies and Subcultural Lives (New York: New York University Press, 2005) and Elizabeth Freeman’s Time Binds: Queer Temporalities, Queer Histories (Durham, N.C.: Duke Press, 2010) might have produced a more nuanced analysis and vibrant comparison. Overall, more attention to what the concept of nonnational might offer beyond other available concepts (for instance, diaspora or diasporic) would have benefited the argument. The Non-National in Contemporary American Literature is an exciting addition to the growing body of Arab American scholarship and has specific appeal for comparativists working to place Arab Americans within a US ethnic frame. It foregrounds Arab American concerns that sometimes overlap and sometimes deviate from other ethnic community concerns, and highlights the transnational and non-national as ways that ethnic others redefine the “nation” in the American context. It would read well in literature classrooms broadly and is an important resource for Arab American literary criticism specifically.